U.S.-Built Bridge Is Windfall — For Illegal Afghan Drug Trade

A drug burning ceremony in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, is arranged by the country's drug control agency. The men were burning hashish and sacks of opium in a country that many worry is slipping toward becoming a narco-state. (Tom Lasseter/MCT)

From McClatchy News:

NIZHNY PANJ, Tajikistan — In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia's poorest countries.

Dressed in a gray suit with an American flag pin in his lapel, then-Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the modest two-lane span that U.S. taxpayers paid for would be "a critical transit route for trade and commerce" between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It's paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe.

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My Comment: Our taxpayer dollars hard at work.